Aesthetics as a Humanism

Philosophical treatments of suicide have largely proceeded along two canonical trajectories: ethical and existential. Ethical frameworks, grounded in normative assessment, often risk intensifying self-condemnation by situating suicidal desire within the register of moral failure. Existentialist accounts, by contrast, tend to aestheticize or romanticize self-destruction as a mode of authentic resolution, thereby introducing a different but equally problematic form of closure. Both frameworks may have structural vulnerabilities when applied to the lived phenomenology of suicidal crisis, where the demand is not for judgment or transcendence but for the reconstitution of meaning within immanent life. This paper proposes aesthetic philosophy as a third, comparatively underexplored framework through which to reconceptualize suicide. In particular, I draw upon phenomenologically oriented theories of everyday aesthetics that emphasize perceptual, embodied, and affective continuities of existence. These approaches reorient philosophical inquiry from normative justification to modes of attention, disclosing ways of remaining in contact with life that do not require prior demonstrations of life's value or coherence.